Joseon Korea:

Religion and Power

Jack Mitchell

10/01/17

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 When reading about various paths taken by the many religions practiced in Joseon-era

Korea, what is perhaps most blatant to the reader is the irreducible relationship that can be

observed between the form of religion practiced by the masses, and the desires of the elite. This

can be easily observed in the text, when we see that Buddhist and shamanist temples in the area

were vigorously criticized by the newly economically empowered Confucians; this wasn’t a

matter of theology, like one might expect a dispute between two religions might be, but instead

over the economic value of the Buddhist/shamanist structure for the Confucian ruling class. The

trap to be avoided here is the naïve Marxist notion of religion being a mere reflection of the

economic/material reality; as we will observe later, religion in the Joseon dynasty did not

exclusively conform to the demands of power. While the text certainly doesn’t hide the fact that

Confucianism in Korea was inextricably tied to the Joseon ruling class (and, therefore, the

economic base sustaining it), to end our analysis on pure economy would be to miss not only

crucial aspects of what constituted Joseon Confucianism outside of the economic sphere, but

more importantly to miss other dynamics of power occurring in Korean religion during this era.

Here we can strategically use the criticism of Marx offered to us by Pals- by conceiving of

religion as only being shaped by economy, what is lost to us is the ability to see how religion

itself can be a source of power, one which also has the ability to shape and change the social

landscape. Avoiding this misstep, this essay will rather begin by simply asserting that an analysis

of religion in Joseon Korea should be primarily done through the lens of power (primarily in

Bourdieu’s sense of power and different forms of capital in addition to economic capital) and

how religions construct themselves in relation to it.

Before looking at what elements constituted the relationship between Confucianism and

Joseon society, it would be beneficial to begin by looking at some of the aspects which
characterized Confucianism in this specific era. Most obvious, of course, is the figure of

Confucius himself. As the text informs us, at the time Confucius gained his popularity China was

experiencing a period of social unrest, a social condition which allowed Confucius to appeal to

both the masses and the leaders. Clearly, following this, Confucius was able to amass a

nationwide following. This cult of personality around Confucius may suggest that one should

qualify his as a “prophet” in the Weberian sense, however we precisely cannot do this, as Weber

himself was well aware. Confucius, despite clearly embodying what Weber might call

“charisma,” was not the bearer of any divine call, there was no ‘Confucian revelation.’ Instead,

Confucius is to be understood as a prophet through Bourdieu’s theory, where a real prophet is

inseparable from a larger social context of crisis. This is an especially fruitful move when we

examine Bourdieu’s conception of the “priest’s discourse” as opposed to the “prophet’s

discourse” in the development of Confucianism in regards to Korea.

For Bourdieu, the prophet must in some way distance himself from the hegemonic

religious discourse of his time; he and his followers symbolically divide the previously

undifferentiated mass of the dominant laity, creating a new reality in the religious field of social

life. The priest’s discourse is reactionary; her intent is always to naturalize the habitus of the

dominant religious group, to implicitly advocate for those who hold the mass of

religious/symbolic capital at the time. If we consider Confucius to be a prophet in Bourdieu’s

definition, what we can observe in Joseon Korea is Bourdieu’s idea that there is a tendency for

the prophet’s religion, if it successfully subverts the previous hegemony of the order it rebels

against, to over time regress into priestly discourse, losing its previously revolutionary character.

In the Confucianism we’re looking at in the Joseon Dynasty, we can see this priestly discourse

on full display, particularly in Korea’s political crisis in the 19th century. At this time, we see a
populist religious movement led by a “rebel leader” (clearly a prophet-type) opposed to the

hegemonic Confucians, who, as priests, attempted to preserve their status via theological reform.

In this way, what we can observe is how something which may have begun as prophetic

discourse can easily shift into priesthood as it accumulates a certain amount of symbolic capital.

Bourdieu’s thought may describe at least some of the larger societal forces surrounding

Joseon Confucianism, however this is hardly all that should be considered, and other authors can

account for aspects of the text Bourdieu’s structuralism cannot. For example, both Bourdieu and

Weber provide us compelling descriptions of how these religious mechanism tend to appear,

neither of them present a meaningful explanation of how religious belief functions. For this shift

to a micro-level look at aspects of Joseon Confucianism, we should look to Geertz.

In Geertz’s understanding of religion, what is primarily emphasized is how one comes to

carry and accept religious ideas and dispositions. For Geertz, religion is inseparable from the

symbolic social landscape it is situated in, wherein it is the uniquely religious symbols which are

the key to understand religious behavior, for it is the religious symbols which simultaneously tell

the subject what the nature of their reality is (“the natural order of things”), as well as how things

generally should be within this reality (“appropriate action”). This is a particularly useful model,

I claim, for understanding the function of the Confucian academies in Joseon Korea. What we

are met with here is a religious institution which effectively functions as a microcosm of the

larger socio-religious context it is situated in, in a Geertzian sense. In these academies, which

were located throughout the entire country, the ritualistic practices within them A. reinforce a

certain cosmological framework, wherein the spirits of deceased ancestors takes on a capital

importance (in addition to this, general Confucian metaphysics were taught in the universities as

well), and B. prescribe a certain mode of behavior which is in conformity with this metaphysical
reality created by the religious symbol; this can be seen in the academies, where hierarchical

modes of governmentality and property control were taught to the Confucian students.

While for the most part, Geertz’s theory is usable for understanding what role the

academies had to have played in the symbolic construction of Confucian believers, it is

nonetheless incapable of telling the full story, in part for the same reasons outlined by Talal Asad

in his critique of Geertz. Although with a short-sighted gaze, Geertz’s theory seems to be capable

of explaining how symbols create the moods and dispositions inherent in religious symbols can

create a religious subject, Geertz is unable to analyze how these religious symbols came to be

religious in the first place, the reason for this being that his theory pays no attention to the

discursive process by which certain symbols undergo in order to be religious. If we were to

attempt this kind of analysis, as Asad claims is imperative to any legitimate study of religion,

certain questions become apparent; when and why did the academy become recognized as a

religious institution in the first place? Who, or perhaps more appropriately ‘what power,’ was in

a position of control which allowed them to deem the academy as a religious institution?

Geertz’s theory of religion appears to be incapable of answering these questions.

A final investigation we could make is a Durkheimian one, meaning that we are required

to ask the following question: how is society getting represented/reproduced in Joseon religion?

Or, more specifically, what is sacred in Joseon religious life, and how does that sacred-ness

represent the social character of the Joseon era? The answer to this question provided to us by

the text is clear: at least one of the inarguably sacred aspects of Confucianism is the dead.

Deceased ancestors were placed in separate (i.e. sacred) buildings, worshipped, and rituals were

reformed in their name. Based on this information, Durkheim’s response is rather easy to

imagine: by venerating deceased ancestors, by worshipping them and making them sacred,
Confucians are really just worshipping Confucian society. While in a way this may be true, a

personal issue I take here with Durkheim is his insistence on ‘society’ as a homogenous entity,

this notion that society is composed of one group of people, without division. If there is anything

to be gained from some of the thinkers mentioned above, from Marx to Bourdieu to Asad, it’s

that society is anything but this, a society is always defined by contradiction.